Climate Change: Scenarios for new territories

Climate Change: Scenarios for new territories
Paola Viganò

The workshop “Climate changes: scenarios for new territories” is part of a broader study that observes the territory of the Veneto region and its paradoxes starting from the most important infrastructural layers and in particular the complex layer of its waters.
The territory of the Veneto region, due to the variety of the different water forms that feature there, from the lagoon to the coast to the inland waterways, constitutes a case of extreme interest on which to test devices and concepts affecting the water system in relation to climate change and to also look into some fundamental aspects of the reflection on ecology: namely the concepts of resilience and resistance.
Over the centuries the design of the waters has contributed, along with that of the roadways that often run parallel to the same, in defining non hierarchical isotropic territorial conditions, favoring diffuse settlements and horizontal relations. Today this enormous stretch of ‘dead labour’, deposited in canals, ditches, banks, drainage channels.. is subject to a new pressure and deep revision on a number of sides, raising the question for the need for a planning of the isotropy, a grand ideal figure, on which an important part of urban and territorial reflection has been built (from Wright, to Gutkin, to the diffuse city) back to the centre of urbanistic reflection.
The evolutions of agriculture, irrigation techniques on the one hand and the new environmental risks, for example associated with climate change, on the other, constantly modify the water support, making new and different selections, canceling and adding, often reducing the connectivity of the hydraulic system, lowering its resilience and the degree of isotropy, this with important consequences on the rest of the territory where in turn the risk of flooding increases and the permeability and the accessibility of its different parts diminishes. For this reason there exists a field of research that questions the contemporary logic of an isotropic infrastructure that lacks privileged directions, that ponders whether there is the need to reinforce and extend the same; on the suitability and usefulness of the same in tackling the new territorial problems.


tools

Starting from the complex system of waters and the need for a more secure territory, the project research explores the possibility of restoring more space to water and uses a particular project form: the construction of scenarios.
The scenario is a form of interrogation of the future that has the purpose of defining the limits of the possible, of structuring a reaction to different hypotheses of the future, of constructing actions that involve the same. In a territory faced with possible choices, alternative routes, continuous forks, providing the opportunity of making the various trajectories explicit is crucial, this in order to make images and fears of the future emerge, to make explicit the types of spaces that might produce and harbor the same; to observe the gap that is produced between the present and the different ideas of the future.
The scenarios can have multiple characters, as the extremely vast literature that concerns the same shows, but in highly synthetic and schematic ways, these can be reduced down to two great families, never totally disjointed from each other: on the one hand, ones has scenarios that deal with techniques, with the means available in the different hypothesis, that evaluate the consequences of their use, the resources needed; on the other scenarios that contemplate objectives, that deal with often conflictual visions and ideas, making different images of the future emerge and comparing the same. Indeed we are dealing with very different types of scenarios, exchanging the one with the other would not only be grotesque, but unprofessional if not perfectly pointless. If it is true that the first family of scenarios can be examined starting from an analysis of the strong and weakpoints, of the opportunities and what threatens the same (SWOT analysis), using the same scheme for evaluating the ideas of the future, images that propose diverging objectives, that draw from different value systems proves a lot more arduous. It is all the same frequent that the discussion on the means and on the techniques flows rapidly into the latter family, and indeed certainly the contrary is never the case. For example, the objective “save Venice”, around which there is a broad consensus, is cyclically and repeatedly weakened by the difficulty of evaluating the technology and the means needed, the impact of the same, the resources required, and thus we are forced not to take for granted an agreement that we believed consensual and reached once and for all.

These aspects, the way they are articulated and their ambiguities are particularly evident if the field of study is the question of climate changes and the spatial and territorial impact of the same. The case is indeed an interesting one, because we need to resort to both families of scenarios, continuously subjecting to criticism the technical devices that for example might be able to tackle the probable rise of sea levels, but at the same time reasoning on the changing cultural and economic context that could lead us to forgo some reclaimed agricultural areas, accept a new coexistence with water and risk or, lastly, definitively abandon the technical-scientific paradigms on which the hydraulic technology of the past has been based.


water and climate change
The general hypothesis from which the workshop starts off is that in the coming future the areas in contact with water, that is to say in the case of the territory considered the lagoon areas, the coast and the banks of the rivers Piave and Livenza, will offer for settlement, spaces subjected to extreme conditions as the result of anthropic pressure (that is pollution, urbanization, and the impermeabilisation of the ground, the development of economic activities) and climate change.
The hypothesis to be looked into is whether it is the climate change that is more serious in terms of its consequences (that is the increase of temperature and the quantity of water in rainfall that will become evermore infrequent, but evermore violent) or whether it is the constant increase in impermeable surfaces and consequent lessening of the corrivation times that will have the more devastating effects. In both cases the phenomenon of flooding will increase, the frequency of which will take its toll of the society that lives in these areas.
Slow down, collect, store water, integrate the depressed crop growing areas along the rivers, reuse old gravel and clay quarries as lamination basins to tackle the water spates and for storage, connect to the network of canals and rivers; reflood portions of the reclaimed areas, reconstruct new wetlands… The water project heads a new reflection on the territory of dispersion, on the project of a collective and public space, on the concept of a common asset. It defines the structure as an “ecological network” capable of participating in the inhabited space and of modifying the same, of cohabiting with the consequences of climate change and contributing to the production of energy.
Crossing the territory lying between the Piave and the Livenza river one goes from the dry and permeable plane to the wet plane and reclaimed areas, three different conditions in which one crosses the natural environment of lagoons, rivers, wet areas, areas of transition and elements of fundamental connection with the rest of the territory.
These three conditions constitute an exemplary field in which scenarios of transformation can be imagined along with a process of adjustment that experiments different systems of defense against floods, their possible integration with other functions, their reversibility or stability, the construction techniques, the types, scales and dimensions.


paradigms
Over the centuries the problem of the defense from the dangers of flooding, the necessity of improving the conditions of salubriousness in the humid coastal area, the need of new areas for the development of port activities has in many areas led to a series of important interventions in terms of rationalization that have modified huge parts of European territory. In the case of the Venetian lagoon, one only needs recall the works of the Venetian Republic – navigable waterways, the diversion and subsequent rectification of the rivers - and in recent times the reclaimation in the thirties, the casse di colmata - the artificial islands of the laguna built mid last century, now a nature reserve - but also the creation of canals and canalette in cement and further upstream, the building of huge and risky dams for the hydro exploitation of the rivers (for the production of electrical energy and for agriculture). Today these rationalities have led to a paradoxical situation: a shortage of water for domestic, agricultural, industrial and ecological uses, and an ever higher risk of flooding.

Everywhere the watchword has been hold back the water and with it the risk: the policies described by the Dutch in terms of ‘dredge, drain, reclaim’ have been dominant not only in a country that has established a highly controversial relationship with water like Holland, but also in Italy.
In the recent past, with very few exceptions, these themes have always been the result of sectoral projects, expressions of distinct and separate knowledge. Civil and hydraulic engineering for example, have followed blocks of paradigms totally disjointed from other points of view of the territory, often invoking the supposed neutrality of technology. Today the sectoral approach, a successful model in western culture and exported throughout the rest of the world, is undergoing a process of fundamental revision.


a workshop
The scenarios built during the workshop have tackled interscale and transdisciplinary questions of a diffused territory. The first group proposed a scenario in which some reclaimed areas would return to wetlands and lagoon areas, situated between that of Venice and the Marano lagoon. The second group is concentrating on the study of a structure, a network of ecological corridors the main ones being the river courses. Lastly, the third group is concentratings on the dry plane and explore the scenario of a reforestation that will affect the same with all its consequences
These first hypotheses, discussed between agronomers, hydraulic engineers, landscape architects, urbanists and architects, speak to us of new space that cannot be designed unless within a renewed dialogue between different points of view. These are project explorations that integrate the ecological dimension with the hydraulic, urbanistic and architectural dimension. They require new alliances between knowledge and disciplines.


Venice, IUAV, june 2009
type: report
workshop financed by the European Social Fund
Professor: Paola Vigano ', Dirk Sijmons, Hank van Tilborgh
tutors: Chiara Cavalieri, Marco Ranzato, Giambattista Zaccariotto